IBM's Blockchain solution for global payments. IBM announced a new blockchain banking solution that will, with partners Stellar.org and KlickEx Group improve the speed in which banks both clear and settle payment transactions on a single network in near real time. IBM says the solution is run from the IBM Blockchain Platform on Hyperledger Fabric and that they will continue to advance the solution with the goal of expanding capabilities in order to support central bank-issued digital currencies, securities, bonds and structured financial assets.

Arm launches security framework IoT at scale. At the annual Arm TechCon conference this year Arm introduced a common industry framework for building secure connected devices, called Platform Security Architecture (PSA). The company said PSA will deliver representative IoT threat models and security analyses, hardware and firmware architecture specs, and a reference open source implementation of the firmware specification called Trusted Firmware-M.

Cisco acquires Perspica. Cisco announced that it is acquiring machine learning-driven operations analytics firm Perspica for an undisclosed amount. Cisco will fold the company staff into AppDynamics, which it purchased earlier in the year for $3.7 billion.

Intel doubles down with $60M on startups. At its annual conference Intel Capital revealed 19 new investments in startups, totaling more than $60 million. Intel Capital's Wendell Brooks focused on the data explosion, noting that "by 2020, every autonomous vehicle on the road will create 4TB of data per day. A million self-driving cars will create the same amount of data every day as 3 billion people. Company investments in startups were from all over the world and included such companies as Trace, Bossa Nova Robotics, Horizon Robotics, Echo Pixel, TileDB, LeapMind and AdHawk Microsystems.

U.S. warns about attacks on energy, industrial firms. This seems almost like a template announcement... that has happened, and will probably keep happening. The U.S. government issued a public warning last week that hackers are targeting energy and industrial firms. Homeland Security warned that nuclear, energy, aviation, water and critical manufacturing industries have been targeted along with government entities in attacks dating back to at least May.